Dorothy West (1907-1998), an out-of-work African American writer living in New York City during the 1930s, was an active participant in the Harlem Renaissance, where writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston referred to her as “the kid” due to her relative youth. After starting the literary magazine Challenge in 1934, she, like many others, turned to federal relief programs in the midst of the Great Depression when times grew desperate. In this capacity, she worked for the Federal Writers’ Project. On September 21, 1938, West arrived in the five-bedroom Harlem apartment of Mayme Reese, at that time a fifty-seven-year-old woman, originally from South Carolina, who had moved north as part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North.